The crowd gathered outside a labour office in the Polish capital is looking for work but not for a job.
Small vans stop occasionally and pick out a few men for a day's "informal" work on a building site or unloading a truck. Inside the government office tattered cards offering full-time positions are ignored by the unemployment relief claimants.
"I'm basically registered here to get health benefits," said 22-year-old Joanna Trepczynska, ignoring the entreaties of a cosmetics vendor trying to sign her up as a door to door saleswoman. "I get money from my parents and I'll probably go back to college."
Poland's social relief and pension system is so inefficient, its labour market so inflexible and entrepreneurs so browbeaten by bureaucracy that official unemployment is soaring while the grey economy grows and employers cannot fill job slots.
It will get worse soon. Around 900,000 baby-boomers will shortly leave school as Europe's biggest demographic bubble, born in a procreative spurt during the dark days of martial law, bursts onto the job markets.
Most are destined for the dole queues, pushing official unemployment rates from 18 per cent now to over 20 per cent by the end of the year, sending shivers through European Union countries fearing a flood of spare workers from economic lame duck Poland.
But many of the unemployed will actually be working, albeit sporadically, those in the country will be continuing a post-communist tradition of rural idleness and many others will be living thinly off hugely abused state hand-out schemes.
It is a recipe for poverty and frustration but not starvation or revolution among 39 million Poles, who in less than two years are likely to be citizens of the EU, which is wondering if it will be paying to blow away the stagnation.
Lacklustre growth and job-shedding across central Europe's largest economy has taken unemployment from 10 per cent in 1998 towards a forecast 25 per cent by 2004, the EU entry target date.
The increase has fuelled the rise of populist politicians and overwhelmed the young leftist government, which is struggling with reforms to make workers cheaper to hire.
Outside the capital life is tougher, particularly in rural areas like the Mazurian lakes north of Warsaw, where unemployment tops 30 per cent.
But living has always been tough there and the pre-1989 tradition of hard-scrabble, beat-the-system, making-do persists. A plot of land and low expectations from life go a long way.
"Unemployment here is not the same phenomenon as in Western Europe," says Adam Czyzewski, an advisor to the Polish Central bank governor on labour market issues.
"People are ready to accept much worse conditions than in the West. They are able to live on small incomes from the hidden economy, but also they are more risk averse."
Leszek Pawlowski has not had a steady job for 10 years and travels regularly from the Mazurian village of Baloszyce, where he and his wife are registered unemployed, to work in Warsaw's grey economy, building houses, painting walls and labouring.
"I try to send home about 200 zloty ($50) a week," said the 42-year-old father of three.
Like 70 per cent of Polish jobless Pawlowski is no longer entitled to unemployment relief, which is only 500 zlotys ($125) a month and lasts just half a year. He has to work to survive.
"The debts are the worst. I can earn enough to feed the kids but its the debts I worry about. We're always worried we'll be thrown out of the house."
Poland's two million smallholdings, a huge burden for successful entry into the EU and its farm markets, ironically offer a useful buffer against the poverty of joblessness, providing a subsistence living for many as under communism.
"People are using skills that they acquired during the old system - how to live parallel to the rules of normal society," says Jacek Kucharczyk of Warsaw's Institute of Public Affairs. "An alternative society exists, broader than the grey zone."
A payroll system that costs an employer 85 cents for every $1 paid to a worker is a powerful disincentive to job creation, leading many small firms to hire staff "off the books" or to pay part of a wage in unrecorded cash supplements.
There are no reliable statistics on the size of the grey economy but Barbara Szlesarska of the Polish Confederation of Private Employers estimates 20 per cent of economic activity in some parts of Poland is irregular, untaxed and unmonitored.
But the ingenuity that goes into outwitting the labour inspectorate is surpassed by the dedication with which Poles wheedle money out of government agencies, which pay out pensions and benefits to more than half the population.
More than 70 per cent of state spending is on health, education and social support, and by some estimates the agencies will be cheated to the tune of 17 billion zlotys ($4 billion) this year, almost 10 per cent of the annual state budget.
Disability benefits cost the state 1.5 billion zlotys a year and are notoriously easy to get, since low-paid doctors can be bribed into signing for them. Recipient and state alike treat them as an unofficial substitute for unemployment relief.
Maternity and sickness benefits often perform the same function. In Lublin, 130 kilometres southwest of Warsaw, doctors suddenly became busy last year when nearly 4,000 workers lost jobs after bankrupt Korean firm Daewoo shut a van factory.
Maciej Sokol, 36, went on sick leave on December 26, five days before he was due to lose his job as a welder, forcing the state to pay him 80 per cent of his salary for six months.
"After sick leave I'll go on unemployment benefit and after that I'll think what to do," said Sokol.
Andrzej Meszawsky, 40, also lost his job. While life is hard the government gives him 250 zloty a month for his five children and his wife is receiving 499 zloty a month in maternity leave five years after leaving a hospital job she was about to lose.
The wide reach of the subsidy system makes reform difficult, since many stand to lose from targeting public money more efficiently at the very poor. The leftist government has said it will take action but concrete steps are yet to emerge.
State handouts offer enough of a disincentive to working that employers can struggle to get staff, particularly in the low-paid sector where action to cut jobless figures is easiest.
Andrzej Malinowski runs a small textiles factory in Jozefow, southeast of Warsaw, that employs 20 people making uniforms, and complains his local labour office cannot find him workers.
"Government programmes to encourage people into work are used simply to funnel money away," he says. Women show up to have him deem them unsuitable so they can get benefit, he adds.
Another textile firm nearby employs "handicapped" workers, but they sit at home on a small stipend or work illegally while the owner declares fictitious activity that lets him profit from VAT refunds that employers of disabled are allowed to claim.
But Poles are not work-shy, say analysts, and the young in particular, where unemployment is 40 per cent, will inevitably take advantage of the shortfalls of the social security system in the absence of well-paying and stimulating employment.
"There is a risk with high youth unemployment that you end up with a lost generation," says the IPA's Kucharczyk. "There is more and more awareness that EU membership might be our only way out of this present predicament."